It Was the Feeling: What Happened After That First Table

Now, with our first few supper clubs under our belt, the real question wasn't whether people wanted to come. It was how on earth we were going to accommodate them.

Because none of us had thirteen chairs. None of us had twelve soup bowls. Nobody has that lying around in a normal house.

I have been going through our Whatsapp chat from two years ago and the challenges we faced.

Turning One Evening Into Something With a Shape

Once we knew this wasn't a one-off, the conversations between us changed. They stopped being "shall we?" and started being "how do we make this properly ours?"

We set aside proper time to sit together — not just quick messages between other things but an hour put aside to talk through the next menu and the season's crafts. We batted round names for a while, before agreeing it needed to be short — something that wouldn't get cut off when it mattered. Well, we became Warmth and Wellness longer than we wanted it to be but it sounded just right. We set up a Whatsapp Community group specifically for the women who'd already come, so we could keep the thread going between evenings sharing recipes and updates.

But the honest truth of those early weeks wasn't candles and driftwood. It was the logistics and amount of chairs, cutlery, crockery...

Which Household Actually Owns Thirteen Soup Bowls?

Nobody does. That was the problem.

The numbers crept up almost as fast as we could reply to messages — eight, then ten then twelve confirmed for a single evening, with the guest list still growing while we were mid-conversation about it. And every single time it happened, the same question landed straight after: what have we actually got to feed and seat that many people with?

Between the two of us we had two wooden folding chairs, some mugs from a beach hut, whatever plates happened to already be in the cupboard. Nowhere close to enough. So at first we pooled it — properly pooled it, item by item, over WhatsApp. 

Dani 'I'll bring my spare folding wooden chairs'

Kaytee 'I've got a spare set of plates and bowls'.

Dani 'Have we got serviettes'.

Kaytee 'we need more spoons'.

How many small plates and bowls do we actually need and can someone drop the bigger stuff off during the day.

It became its own little ritual before every evening: forks, spoons, small plates, soup bowls, chairs, counted out like we were running a much bigger operation than two women and a dining room.

It worked, but only just and only because we kept lending each other what we individually owned rather than what either of us actually needed for a table that size.

That's when the charity shops came in properly useful. Cutlery especially — you can't buy twelve matching soup spoons on a whim without spending more than the evening itself would ever bring in, but you absolutely can build a set up slowly, mismatched and characterful, for next to nothing, one visit at a time. Cups and saucers the same way. It stopped being a stopgap and became how we actually equipped the whole thing — a shelf's worth of secondhand crockery collected a few pieces at a time, cheaper, kinder to the budget, and honestly nicer to look at than a boxed set would have been anyway.

It also meant nobody ever had to feel like they were carrying the cost of hosting on their own. The table got dressed the same way the guest list grew — bit by bit between us with whatever either of us could reasonably find.

Where That Left Us

We never did end up with a full matching dinner service, and I don't think either of us wants one now. There's something right about a table set with bowls that came from three different charity shops and a service of forks that don't quite match — it looks like what it is: something built together, on the go, by two people who said yes before they'd worked out exactly how.

And now that we host in a beautiful vintage tearoom rather than a dining room, that mismatched collection hasn't needed retiring at all. Everything in the vintage tearoom is mix and match by nature — cups that don't quite pair with their saucers, patterns from different decades sitting happily side by side. We were building the exact look we didn't know we'd end up needing.

This is the second in a series about building a supper club from scratch. Next: the menus that taught us what this club is really for.